


if i could calm that fire

by itinerantmagpie



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Alcohol, Domestic Fluff, F/M, M/M, Multi, Suggestive Themes, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, but no sex i'm not there yet..., maybe flirting?? how does this work, seriously I love my good good space thruple band
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-06
Updated: 2019-02-06
Packaged: 2019-10-23 05:12:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17677052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itinerantmagpie/pseuds/itinerantmagpie
Summary: Everyone's favorite post-Miracle post-punk group, chilling out.This grew slowly over the course of literal months. I have no clue why I wrote it, but it made me happy.title is from "precious creature" by Tomas Dvorak





	if i could calm that fire

Waltz Tango [Cache] had just lost his head. Again. 

The moment of transferring was always vertigo and spinning and turning and stumbling, out of the backup closet in the Bolero Smooth where his bodies stayed. He put fingers to his head, to his chest, and everything was still there. Good thing it hadn’t shaken him too bad this time. 

He’d had it worse before, what with all of the battle erupting across the system, and this time it was deliberate, even joyful. It wasn’t every day you got to blow Advent to smithereens with your own head; this time he had only laughed as they put the cuffs on him, and then erased two Independence models and a sizeable chunk of the iceberg they were on in a ball of green fire.

Technically, he was better than ever. All he needed was-- a drink. A drink, and some spaghetti, and a sit-down while the new metal got warmed up and his nerves got all reconnected to his thoughts. 

Ten minutes later-- or maybe thirty, time melted in the usual way when he was still drifting inside his own head-- his plate was clean, his glass was empty, and he was sprawled on one of the ultra-mod couches Lily had dragged in, staring at nothing in particular and wondering about the system’s future.

“Saw you explode,” Tannoy’s voice remarked out of nowhere, the purple-haired smuggler captain audibly smirking. “Nothing for me to tune up, no dents, dings, scratches?” Hands landed on the mechanical man’s shoulders.

“Don’t worry about it,” Waltz drawled, with his usual deadpan “blink” up. “Lily’s workin’ on some sort’a replacement for my harpoon gun. After the first one blew up.” 

There was a little point of lime light that darted across the surface of his spherical grenade-eye, scrutinizing Tannoy like a pupil. It always hypnotized him, and many times as they pressed up close in a bunk on the Other Hand or a couch in the Bolero Smooth he’d drifted to sleep staring into it, the glow fading in time with his drooping eyelids.

“Yeah, heard about that,” Tannoy replied, and dropped onto the couch next to him with a thud, kicking his legs up. Tears pricked his eyes as he yawned. “She’s been working way too late recently. Should we get her in here? Gig’s about to drop another ep of that special Ark show he’s been doing, I know she loves the… the craft? She says it feels genuine.”

“Gen-u-ine,” Waltz hummed, sounding out each syllable. “Sure does. That Kep-hart guy, he’s… he’s an honest sorta person.”

“Oh, he is? That’s right, yeah, you met him.” Tannoy snapped his fingers, smirking at Waltz while he wound his arm around the bounty hunter’s shoulders. “I remember. On Gift-3-- aw, waitaminnit, Waltz!”

“What?”

“Our six-month anniversary?”

“You’re countin’ every six months now? At least wait a year,” Waltz shoots back. “We haven’t even had an Excerpt make it _official_ or nothin’. I didn’t win any awards rushin’ into lifetime commitments. Maybe a fast-breakup award.” There’s a hint of humor in his voice, but it’s still not enough to keep Tannoy’s purple brows from scrunching.

“Yeah, well,” the smuggler retorts, and then trails off, momentarily. “...maybe not. Maybe we should make it official-- yanno?”

“I thought we already had,” replies Waltz smoothly, and there’s a little electrical zap, just a tease, from his exposed head-part to his partner’s cheek. A brief second of wide-eyed silence from Tannoy lets him goad: “You didn’t think I was gonna _say_ it. You left yourself _wi-i-ide_ open for that one, Kajj.”

“Why would you rub my _face_ in it like that?” _,_ Tannoy bemoans, and his chest quivers with a resonant chuckle. “Is it because of last time? I’ll apologize, I swear.”

Waltz returns with that dry laugh, and his hand comes down. His talons, gleaming metal, drag over one leg of Tannoy’s jeans, creasing little circles under their points, and the smuggler laughs out the rest of his breath, pecks one of the little metal corners of Waltz's head and lets his lips linger.

“Hey, hey, wait a minute, _hey_ ,” interjects Lily, eyes wide, “you two. Are you doing this without me?”

That’s approximately when Waltz and Tannoy both look up from their respective positions to stare. Waltz doesn’t have expressions as a matter of necessity, and Tannoy is smooth enough to paper his own look of surprise over quickly, but for a moment they both looked less like feared criminals and more like kids with their hands caught in the cookie jar. Tannoy’s red-faced, arching, hands grabbing at the fabric of the couch, and Waltz’s palm is pressed into his fly as the robot leans across his lap. There’s a conspicuous muffled sound like a vacuum turning off, and Tannoy slumps, exhales, grinning-- first nervous, then sincere, then relieved.

“Hey, Lil,” he remarks voice strained, and then there’s a conspicuous muffled sound like a vacuum turning on. He draws the line of his body tight again, and his smile strains and puffs outward with breath. “Waltz! Ah, I mean, uh. Yeah, guess, guess we are. That mean you wanna join? We were kinda lonely.”

“Smartass,” Lily hums, and parks herself on the arm of the couch just next to Tannoy. “I’m done with the harpoon for now. It’s all better.” She’s in the Divine Riot tee, one of the spares they had left lying around after the print run, and both of them can practically feel the heat of the glowing star-tattoos on her pink cheeks when they look at her. 

“Thankya,” Waltz murmurs, and then, wryly, “What would I do without both’a you? Huh?”

Lily’s hips tilt and she slides, settles onto the couch proper. “Win fewer awards. Waltz, get up. C’mon.” The two shuffle, abashed, into each other’s arms, and she lets herself unfold bit by bit. “I just need to get cozy and I can’t do that with you two-- _sucking off_ here, ohmygod. You eat spaghetti with that mouth, don’t you?!” 

“I do more’n eat _spaghetti_ with it, Lysander,” comes his exasperated groan, and then: “You know that.”

“Oh, _shit_!” comes Tannoy’s gleeful cackle. “ _Yo_!”

Lily rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling too.

Apparently waterslide go-kart races were not, in fact, putting waterslides on go-karts; they were more like putting go-karts on waterslides. This irritated Waltz greatly because, as he explained with uncharacteristic fire over his second whiskey neat, “the whole damn thing’s based on th’assumption,” dramatic pause, “that it’s a _fractal_ operatin’ scheme, see, with slides on karts on slides n’ havin’ a kind of relay-mandala whatnot.”

“Waltz,” cautions Lily, spread across most of Tannoy’s lap. She nudges the bounty hunter’s metal thigh with her heel. 

“This is just that one gamespace with the hover-boats, but analog,” Tannoy adds, and then his jaw drops open.

“Huh,” Waltz beeps.

“Jeez,”’ murmurs Lily.

“Eight Divines! Wait, how did he pull off that turn with that grade of repulsor? Hey!” Tannoy leans forward so far he nearly dislodges his snickering girlfriend from her perch, and murmurs, fingers on chin: “I gotta learn some more tricks from that guy.”

Waltz just shakes his head, and the light of his dome flicker-fizzles in a kind of wry way. “See? Gig Kep-hart. Genuine _and_ he always got a trick up his sleeve.”

The three laugh, and exhale together. Lily beckons her glass over from the coffee table. “We should hit on him,” she proposes, after biting a little levitating blob of liquor out of the air. “Waltz, am I our in? I guess I made him a hat. Maybe not for-real for real, hitting-on,” she adds, “but, if we could make him blush, I mean, that’d be cute.”

“Yeah,” murmurs Tannoy, now completely absorbed. He leans back into the couch and takes a gulp of his drink (virgin pina colada, purple pineapple to match his hair). “Well, wait, now. It hasn’t been that long since the Notion got broken up, yeah? We should wait.”

“Kep-hart looks happy,” Waltz adds. “Doesn’t look messed up about it at all. And I’d know, I mean, he’s _genuine.”_

By the capital-E end of the night they’re squashed into each other. Waltz is the bedrock; he has the structural integrity for it, and Tannoy sits astraddle while Lily-- in her usual way-- perches, squeezes them both with lazy certainty. 

“Divine Riot,” Lily chirps.

“Divine Riot,” the other two chorus, and knock back their last drink.

“And a job well done,” adds Waltz.

Tannoy gives a pleased little murmur, pressing cheek to cheek with Lily. His pompadour has started to let loose little purple strands. 

“You know,” he adds, after a long and satisfied, shifting quiet, “this is really what we’re fighting for, right? What I saw on Moonlock, that’s nothing compared to this. This is _too_ good. See, like-- beyond ideology, all we want to do is to be touched. You know? To get connected, and all that. Isn’t that what the Mirage is about?”

“Tan’”, hums Lily, rubbing noses with him, “how do you get so romantic on just pineapple juice?”

“What?” Tannoy insists.

Then he tapers off incoherently, because Waltz has found a way to start eating his spaghetti again. 


End file.
